Uploaded August 2020 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
This work presents the design, development and autonomous navigation of the alpha-version of our Resilient Micro Flyer, a new type of collision-tolerant small aerial robot tailored to traversing and searching within highly confined environments including manhole-sized tubes. The robot is particularly lightweight and agile, while it implements a rigid collision-tolerant design which renders it resilient during forcible interaction with the environment. Furthermore, the design of the system is enhanced through passive flaps ensuring smoother and more compliant collision which was identified to be especially useful in very confined settings. Focusing on autonomous operations in narrow environments, the presented research realizes four key functionalities, namely a) visual-inertial odometry for pose estimation, b) a policy for uniform clearance from nearby objects relying purely on two ultra-lightweight time-of-flight sensors, c) a more general policy for balancing optical flow based on the onboard vision of the system, and d) the detection of collisions with the environment as an anomaly on the inertial measurement data. The final system prototype is capable of 14min of endurance and weights less than 500g. A comprehensive experimental study is presented in which the robot is tasked to navigate through two rooms connected via a manhole-sized (width x height} equal to 0.5 x 0.4m) tube with a length of 3.5m.
This work presents the design, development and autonomous navigation of the alpha-version of our Resilient Micro Flyer, a new type of collision-tolerant small aerial robot tailored to traversing and searching within highly confined environments including manhole-sized tubes. The robot is particularly lightweight and agile, while it implements a rigid collision-tolerant design which renders it resilient during forcible interaction with the environment. Furthermore, the design of the system is enhanced through passive flaps ensuring smoother and more compliant collision which was identified to be especially useful in very confined settings. Focusing on autonomous operations in narrow environments, the presented research realizes four key functionalities, namely a) visual-inertial odometry for pose estimation, b) a policy for uniform clearance from nearby objects relying purely on two ultra-lightweight time-of-flight sensors, c) a more general policy for balancing optical flow based on the onboard vision of the system, and d) the detection of collisions with the environment as an anomaly on the inertial measurement data. The final system prototype is capable of 14min of endurance and weights less than 500g. A comprehensive experimental study is presented in which the robot is tasked to navigate through two rooms connected via a manhole-sized (width x height} equal to 0.5 x 0.4m) tube with a length of 3.5m.
